


Balancing Act

by Malkin Grey (malkingrey)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-29
Updated: 2010-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-13 10:59:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malkingrey/pseuds/Malkin%20Grey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn't lie.  But there are things he doesn't say.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Balancing Act

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Not mine; not for money. Spoilers through SPN 6.08, "All Dogs Go to Heaven"

After the hunt for the skin-walker (and what a mess _that_ had been, with a conspicuous body count and no alpha monster to show for it), Sam Winchester decides that the best thing to do, for the sake of his own skin, is to tell Dean the truth.

He knows that his brother finds working with him distasteful. Sam wouldn't consider this to be important -- any negative feelings aroused by his present soul-deprived state are Dean's problem, not his -- but there's always the chance that Dean might remember the promise he made to their father, and decide that now is the time he's supposed to carry it out. Which would be more than a bit hypocritical, Sam thinks, considering how hard Dean resisted the same idea the whole time Azazel was grooming him for leadership of a demonic army, and later when Lucifer was courting him for a tailor-made consenting meat suit, but Dean has always been all about the emotional connections. If he doesn't feel like there's anyone he recognizes on the other end of his connection with Sam, then there's no telling what he might do.

Laying his cards on the table is a bold move, but not, in Sam's judgment, an excessively risky one. Dean won't be happy to have his worst suspicions vindicated like that -- but Dean isn't happy right now, either. And this way, if he hears Sam out and doesn't try to put him down for a monster on the spot, he's unlikely to go after him some other time when he isn't looking.

Truth, then, is the way to go. Just not all of the truth about everything, and not all of the truths that could be told.

***

The first unspoken truth -- unspoken because Dean would never believe it -- is that Sam has _always_ thought about his life this way, has always worked things out by weighing one course of action against another, subtracting risks and adding benefits and making his choices based on which way the scales come down. The only difference now is that the blocks labeled "love" and "guilt" and "family", with their combined weights larger than almost anything he could set against them (but not larger than everything, or he could never have gotten onto the bus for Palo Alto, could never have cut himself loose and stayed free during those years at Stanford) -- those things just aren't there for Sam any more.

Dean won't understand how the Sam he remembers could have thought about life that way in the first place, not when Dean himself has never for an instant weighed the risks against the benefits when family was involved. Dean believes that he can't depend upon Sam as he is now, as if the dispassionate ability to add up the pros and the cons of a thing made a person more difficult to predict, rather than less. Which Sam thinks is proof of a surprising lack of self-awareness on Dean's part, considering that there's never been any way in hell to predict how far, or in what direction, Dean would go once his protective instincts were aroused.

***

It's true that Sam doesn't care about Ben and Lisa. Dean will believe that truth when he hears it, because it fits right into the jigsaw-puzzle image he's building up, the one with the label on it that says "Sam-who-is-not-my-brother."

What's better left unspoken is that Sam never really cared that much about Ben and Lisa in the first place. Or rather, he'd cared about them, but with the same mostly abstract concern that he'd felt for all of the ghost-haunted, demon-possessed, monster-hunted civilians who made their brief unhappy appearances on the Winchester stage, which was probably the same way that might-have-been-a-lawyer Sam would have cared about his clients: While the case was on, he'd give them everything he had and then some, but when it was over, they'd be relegated to folders in a filing cabinet, kept on hand for quick reference but otherwise never thought about from one day to the next.

But Dean _had_ cared about Lisa, and about Ben who wasn't, but who might have been, his son; and Sam had cared about Dean. He'd gone down into the Pit caring about Dean, caring and hoping that his brother would find some kind of peace in the aftermath of war. He'd lost those feelings somewhere between his descent and his unanticipated return, but the memory of them remained.

Memory by itself might not have kept Sam from making his presence known to Dean during the year that followed -- but observation from a distance had sufficed to inform him that his brother's head was no longer in the game, and if the djinn hadn't shown up he would have left Dean alone with his picket-fence domesticity. Sam had been doing just fine without Dean (except for the whole missing-soul thing, which he hadn't known about at the time) and Dean, to be honest, had been better off without him.

***

Another truth that Sam thinks ought to go unsaid: It would be a bad idea to point out to Dean that Sam's current (presumably reversible) state of being doesn't mean that he's been rendered completely clueless. To be specific, he hasn't failed to notice that Dean apparently feels more sympathy for Bobby Singer, who mortgaged his soul to Crowley for a pair of functioning legs, than he does for his own brother, who became unwillingly -- or at least no longer wittingly -- stripped of his soul in the process of a trip out of Hell that he still doesn't remember.

Sam considers that, on balance, it's probably a good thing he isn't equipped, at the moment, with the capacity to feel resentment.

***

Sam's also not going to point out to Dean that just getting him his soul back -- _if_ the trick turns out to be actually possible, and _if_ he decides that he wants to go through with it -- isn't necessarily going to make him a better human being, because he's no longer certain that he ever really was one. Castiel had once matter-of-factly called him an abomination, and when he considers that he was force-fed a demon's blood while he was still in the cradle, he thinks that the angel may have had a point. But that's not all. He's fairly sure that something else has changed in his basic wiring since his -- release? escape? he really hates theorizing without adequate data -- from the cage with Michael and Lucifer. For one thing, he took biology in high school and intro psych at Stanford, and he knows that actual human beings cannot go for long without sleep.

***

And the fact that Sam is still weighing the pros and cons of the entire soul-restoration project? That's another truth he's better off with Dean not knowing.

He's fairly certain that it's possible. Crowley's an honest demon as demons go (which admittedly isn't very far), and if he does possess the key to releasing Sam's soul the odds are that he'll hold up his end of the deal. Eventually, anyhow. But he'll try to get out of it first, because double-dealing is in his nature. Which is why Sam isn't going to mention his fence-sitting to Crowley, either.

Over the past few years, Sam has come to the considered opinion that demons, taken as a class, are profoundly stupid. More than one of them, by now, has spent a great deal of time and hard work trying to persuade, tempt, or coerce him into going over to the Dark Side of the Force, and their efforts, while sometimes painful or frightening, have also been laughably inept. The only thing that he had ever really wanted -- and while the fierceness of that longing is gone now, the memory of it remains -- was to finish law school, marry Jess, and have a happy and moderately successful ordinary life. Yet for some reason, no demon so far has thought to make him that offer.

Crowley, though, might actually be clever enough to try.

Sam doesn't miss Jessica now, or grieve for her. But he remembers how it felt when he did -- the knife-sharp, gutting pain of the first few months, and the slow dull ache that came after -- and he thinks that one of the good things about his current state is that he doesn't feel that way any more.

He knows that demonic bargains seldom turn out well for the person making them, but to have Jessica again, and the soul to love her, he might be willing to deal. Perdition, after all, has been following after him for most of his life -- and if a jumped-up crossroads demon like Crowley can move into a power vacuum and take over as King of Hell, then one of Azazel's special children can almost certainly do better for himself when his time is up and the hellhounds come.

But that's something else that Dean doesn't need to know. At least, not until Sam has finished weighing all his options and seen which way the scales come down.


End file.
